One of the top online poker players during the poker boom has just been accused of stealing nearly $30,000 from one of the top online poker players in today’s game: Brad “YukonBrad” Booth has been accused on the 2+2 poker forum by Douglas “WCGrider” Polk of not living up to his end of a money transfer, and owing him nearly $28,000. According to Polk, Booth has turned off his phone and left the country after giving him a sob story about being broke.

According to the post made by “WCGrider” Booth was looking to get back into online poker and needed a transfer at Lock Poker. A friend of Polk’s said Booth had been playing at the Wynn and had at least $50,000 on him. Polk first sent Booth $13,000 which he received in cash the next day from Booth, but from there things went very wrong according to WCGGrider’s 2+2 Post:

“…Then Brad asked if he could get a bigger transfer. It seemed to me like it was safer, with the first transfer being successful. At this point he asked for ~$30,000, which I sent him online. Several days later, when we were trying to reach an agreement on when to meet up and transfer, he told me the unfortunate news via text message. The messages are long and rambly, but we eventually agreed to meet up and discuss things. When we met up, he told me the unsettling news of many of his other debts, how little money he has, and the inside scoop on many additional things. I told him if he continues to work with me and stay in contact, and make some small payments at a time, that we can work things out. He agreed, and a week later made me a payment of $2,200. However since then, he has left the country, changed his phone number, and has started completely ignoring me.”

Booth has been through the ringer in his poker career, but he has also built-up a very suspect reputation among his peers; a reputation it seems to many people are still unaware of. Booth was THE MAN during the poker boom, regularly playing in the highest stakes games online at Ultimate Bet Poker, which may have made him one of the prime targets of the site’s Super-Users, who fleeced Booth for somewhere between a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars depending on whom you ask.

After this Booth’s game was in shambles and he took to borrowing money, shooting most of it off playing online poker (still at Ultimate Bet and getting cheated) and later in live poker and sports-betting. According to some sources Booth owes in the ballpark of $1,000,000.

Since this time Booth has been called out numerous times for owing money and also for degenerate behavior. Still, it seems many people still have sympathy for Booth’s plight after the Super-User fiasco, and even recently when he tried to extort money from Phil Hellmuth (saying he had damaging information on Hellmuth) a lot of players were willing to get in Booth’s corner.

However, if the current allegation is true, this is likely the end of Booth’s time as an accepted member of the poker world.

Tags: Boom, Debts, Game, Money Transfer, Online Poker, Peers, Phone Number, Poker Forum, poker players, Reputation, Ringer, SCOOP, Text Message, Wynn

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2012 at 7:15 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.